The History of White People (56 page)

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7
“Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” in
Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, 241. Michael S. Kimmel quotes a late nineteenth-century American calling for “a saving touch of old fashioned barbarism.” See “Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920,”
Michigan Quarterly Review
3, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 7–10, 13–16, 29.

8
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 23, 155.

9
Gildas,
The Ruin of Britain
(ca. 540), quoted in Bryan Sykes,
Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 256–57.

10
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 23.

11
Emerson, “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” 242.

12
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 33. For the comparison of people to fruit trees, see
CWRWE
, vol. 4,
Representative Men
(1987), 56;
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(hereafter
Journals
), vol. 11,
1848–1851
, ed. A. W. Plumstead, William H. Gilman, and Ruth H. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 8, 42, 131, 142, 152, 283, 357;
Journals,
vol. 10,
1847–1848
, ed. Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 5, 91, 99–100. See also Horace S. Kallen,
Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples
(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 329.

13
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 32, 154.

14
Ibid., 36.

15
Ibid., 2.

16
In
Journals
, vol. 10, 221. On Greenough see F. O. Matthiessen,
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
(1941, 1968), 140, 148, quoted in Robert D. Richardson Jr.,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 539. See also “Horatio Greenough,” Smithsonian American Art Museum online, http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?ID=1935.

17
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 34.

18
Ibid., 18.

19
Ibid., 35.

20
Ibid., 169.

21
Robert Knox,
The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations
(1862) [this is the 2nd edition of
Races of Men: A Fragment
, published in 1850.] See also Hannah Franziska Augstein, ed.,
Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850
(Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 246.

22
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 118–19.

23
In
Journals
, vol. 13,
1852–1855
, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 83, 128–29.

24
Ibid., 39.

25
Ibid., 398.

26
CWRWE
, vol. 2,
Essays: First Series
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 33, 43. Journal AZ (1849), p. 20, in
Journals
, vol. 11, 192.

27
Journals
, vol. 13,
1852–1855
, 115–16, 248.

28
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 171.

29
See http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/magnacarta.html and “Magna Carta,”
Encyclopædia Britannica Online
, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9050003.

30
See Hugh A. MacDougall,
Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), 26–37, 56–62, 81–86, 91–92.

31
James A. Secord, “Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and
Vestiges
,” in
History, Humanity and Evolution
, ed. James Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 178, 182, 185–86. See also James A. Secord,
Victorian Sensation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

32
Editor’s note, “Robert Chambers,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(New York, 1845), in Emerson’s library,” in
Journals
, vol. 9,
1843–1847
, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 64, 211.

33
Robert Chambers,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1st ed., 1844), ed. James Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 306, from the Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive online, http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ library/vestiges/ chapter16.html.

34
Chambers,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, chap. 16; Milton Millhauser,
Just before Darwin: Robert Chambers and
Vestiges (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 33, 118, 128, 147.

35
Millhauser,
Just before Darwin
, 5, 8–9, 22–28, 31–34.

36
Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” xxii, xxvi.

37
Millhauser,
Just before Darwin
, 32.

38
See Richardson,
Emerson
, 518. Also xxii–xxvi in
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, and Journal CO (1851), p. 81: “And Knox’s law of races, that nature loves not hybrids, & extinguishes them. That the race colony detached from the race deteriorates to the crab.” Note, “See Robert Knox, M.D.,
The Races of Men: A Fragment
(Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 52, 86, 107, 317,” in
Journals
, vol. 11,
1848–1851
, 392.

39
Knox,
Races of Men
(1850), 6.

40
Knox,
Races of Men
(1862), in Augstein, ed.,
Race
, 248. For the controversy over Knox’s actual scientific influence, see Peter Mandler, “The Problem with Cultural History,”
Cultural and Social History
(2005): 101–2.

41
See Athena S. Leoussi, “Pheidias and ‘L’Esprit Moderne’: The Study of Human Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century English and French Art Education,”
European Review of History
7, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 16–188.

42
Knox,
Races of Men
(1850), 7, quoted in Cora Kaplan, “White, Black and Green: Racialising Irishness in Victorian England,” in Peter Gray, ed.,
Victoria’s Ireland?: Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 51. Knox, a southern Scot like Carlyle, also wrote in terms of “we Saxons.”

43
Emerson,
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
, 28.

44
Ibid., 29.

45
Ibid., 32, 86, 91. With a somewhat different meaning from my own, Cornel West cites Emerson’s “double consciousness.” West notes that, for Emerson, historical circumstances cannot be understood apart from race. See West,
The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 34, 39.

CHAPTER 12: EMERSON IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE

1
Sophia Peabody (later the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne) wrote her intellectual sister about Emerson in 1838, before he had gained his greatest prominence. Quote from Robert D. Richardson Jr.,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 524; see also 522–23.

2
Theodore Parker quoted in 1850 in Neil Baldwin,
The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 61.

3
See, e.g., Joel Porte,
Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time
(originally published 1979) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1, 8, 19.

4
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 5,
English Traits
(hereafter
CWRWE
, vol. 5,
English Traits
) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 24.

5
An example of Emerson’s depiction of black people as a piteous race of permanent enslavement appears in one of Emerson’s clearest antislavery statements:
An Address delivered in the court-house in Concord, Massachussetts, on 1st August, 1884: on the anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the British West Indies
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1844).

6
Journal V, pp. 62–63, in
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(hereafter
Journals
), vol. 9,
1843–1847
, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 125.

7
Journals
, vol. 11,
1848–1851
, ed. A. W. Plumstead, William H. Gilman, and Ruth H. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), xv. Emerson’s comments on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 take up pp. 343–65 of vol. 11 of
Journals
.